Nicole Awai, Resident Artist Lecture 2024

Nicole Awai gives a lecture about her interdisciplinary practice as an artist which spans-but is not limited too– drawing, painting, sculpture, and collage. Awai first begins talking drawing, and how for her, it has functioned as a place to create multiple perspectives. For Awai, drawing is a medium where one thing can be many things to many people. Awai then speaks about her relationship to collage, and how she first approached this medium by cutting up paintings she would make and rearranging them while still wanting the viewer to stay in the place of drawing. Working in these mediums has allowed Awai to take on a new relationship with time as well; it becomes elastic, and the present and the past become one for Awai. Awai then poses the following questions in her practice: What is real in the Caribbean diasporic landscape? What does it mean to make a painting that paints itself? It is these questions that gradually allows Awai to move from the two dimension and three dimensional. Awai also speaks about the afro-asian body that is connected to a history of being in the United States, particularly how these bodies functions as monuments. Thinking about these bodies in this way has led Awai too further think about transmutation and transition: when something becomes one thing and then morphs into something else. Awai ends her lecture by speaking about chance; how a lot of the work is also about chance: what works, what fails, what surprises Awai. For Awai, there is a risk and a chance involved in being an artist. None of what she can do is prescribed in anyway, and what this has taught Awai is that she has honed the skill of being prepared for and responding to anything.